View full sizeDebby Wong/US PresswireLouisville's Peyton Siva (left) has mimicked the play of Seton Hall's Jordan Theodore (right) to help lift his team.

ON COLLEGE BASKETBALL

When Louisville wrapped up its regular season with a nine-point loss at Syracuse, Rick Pitino had a problem. The Cardinals head coach was watching his point guard’s talent go to waste and his team was stumbling toward the finish line. Louisville would enter the Big East Tournament having lost four of its last six games and needed to give Peyton Siva something to shoot for.

“Jordan Theodore is a great point guard,” Siva said in the moments after the Cardinals won the Big East Tournament championship 10 days ago. “The way he leads his team. We just tried to look at some of the great point guards in the Big East. They run kind of the same offense as we do and have a similar team and we just wanted to get to that.”

Boy, have they ever.

Tonight, a rejuvenated Siva will lead fourth-seeded Louisville into the Sweet 16 against No. 1-seed Michigan State in the West Regional in Phoenix. Since Pitino gave him examples of point guards doing it all for their teams — topped by the Pirates’ senior floor captain, as well as NBA star Steve Nash — Louisville has been a different team.

In addition to capturing the Big East title, the Cardinals are on a six-game winning streak. And it’s all thanks to a Siva finding that inspiration in Theodore.

“What he did, going into this final part of the season, is look at how aggressive Jordan was being,” Seton Hall head coach Kevin Willard said this week. “They watched film on him and saw when he was aggressive, when he took shots and when he ran the team. And I think that helped.”

Willard didn’t know that his mentor was using his own point guard as the catalyst for a deep run in March. The Seton Hall coach didn’t find out until he was watching the postgame celebration after the Cardinals won the Big East Championship and Pitino let the cat out of the bag on national television.

“We talk quite a bit and we’ve talked quite a bit this season, but it’s more or less on the total team stuff and team-building stuff,”

Willard said. “I think everybody uses somebody. Like I told (Seton Hall freshman forward) Brandon Mobley at the end of the year, that (West Virginia’s) Kevin Jones is somebody that we’ve got to watch film on. You can be a Kevin Jones-type player very soon.

“I think all coaches look at certain areas of certain guys and think that, ‘You can be this guy,’ or ‘You can be that guy.’ ”

In the six-game winning streak that Louisville is on, Siva has been channeling Theodore at his finest this season. Siva is averaging 13 points per game, 5.6 assists (to 3.3 turnovers) and 4.6 rebounds.

The comparison to Theodore seems to be a natural fit.

“I think their roles are very similar,” Willard said. “Coach (Pitino) needs Peyton to play at a very high level. To get hard shots, to create easy buckets, be aggressive in looking to get shots. It’s very similar with what we tried to get Jordan to do with us. He had to get Aaron Cosby shots, had to get Fuquan (Edwin) shots, get Herb (Pope) some easy buckets. I think the teams and the roles are very, very similar.”

So even though Theodore and Seton Hall didn’t make the NCAA Tournament this season, a small part of them is still being carried through March.

“I’m just glad that he was able to take something that we were doing and really help motivate one of his best players,” Willard said.

“That’s what it was. It was trying to take watching Jordan play. I think it’s more of a compliment to Jordan, than anything else.”

On College Basketball will appear regularly during the NCAA Tournament.